Monthly Archives: January 2011

You may remember the EKARP lamp I was envisioning for Hailey’s room from this post. On my hubby’s day off this week, we took advantage of the time before naptime/morning-sickness time and made a quick trip to Ikea to pick it up. With a $10 lampshade, the total for the lamp came to a mere $40. The lamp looks great, but is a bit dimmer than the old lamp. I still would love to paint it white and fix up the lampshade with some fabric or ribbon to tie it in with the room. But my hour-long naps encroach a bit on project time…

Back to blogging after a week without my laptop. Apple managed to save everything off of my hard drive after it crashed. They replaced the hard drive and gave me a complimentary key board replacement.

I wanted to focus this post on the work that has been put into organizing and decorating the Study Room in our apartment. The study has had many purposes over the last year, including a video-gaming room and storage space for bikes, tires etc. We finally got this room into better shape by re-organizing and giving away old unnecessary objects. So much of home-decorating and organizing involves ridding your house of anything that isn’t regularly used. A great question to ask is “Does this room look better with or without this ….(couch, chair, table)?” For us, it was “Does this room look better with or without the chair, table lamp, mini-fridge, and TV?” As embarrassing as it is, here is a before picture of our study when it was transitioning between being a separate TV spot to becoming an actual Study (sorry for the blurry picture, it makes it even worse doesn’t it?)

This corner of the room has undergone many changes and looks completely different now. The give-aways ended up being the TV, mini-fridge and pink chair and the room has certainly benefited from it. My decorating projects (Campaign Desk, Chalkboard, and Globe) gave the room a History or Library theme, which was intentional because my husband loves history. We shifted the desk over to the other corner of the room so that it is now the first thing you seen as you walk in.

It is so refreshing to get rid of things that make a room less attractive. We are looking forward to more organizing projects in the study (specifically the closet!)

I’m sorry for the long silence! Since making a resolution to work on Hailey’s nursery a few weeks back, we’ve had a minor (but welcome) setback. We found out that Hailey will be a big sister in about 8 months! Although we are super stoked for this event, so far I have been feeling really sick and also suddenly developed gluten intolerance. So…you may not be seeing many posts from me. Today I’m feeling great so far (praise the Lord).

After the post about Hailey’s room I cringed when I saw her bookcase in it’s disarray. I’ve never been great at arranging bookcases, so I decided to work a little harder at it. Here is the before:

I decided to remove all the “big girl” books from the shelves – you know, my childhood favorites that I’ve been saving all this time in hopes that she will love them too. I can easily stash them somewhere else in the name of decluttering! So after removing the books and finding some giveaways while I was at it, I rearranged, placing non-book objects between clusters of like books, and stacking the books various ways to give some variety to the shelf. Here is the after: